Introduction

184
Sabina Fazli
and the Arabian Nights is at the source of European imaginations of the Orient as
luxurious and decadently wealthy. The immense value of the diamonds is thus
framed by references to their unreal quality and their being part of timeless legend
rather than the present. The fictional geography of a literary Orient, however,
overlaps and contrasts with the history of British India and the diamonds as colonial
objects. The notion of a curse laid on a treasure points to the imagined origin
of the diamonds in a world apart. This image exists side by side with the very real
association of the diamonds with the violence of the Indian Mutiny.
The Mutiny which forms the backdrop of the theft of jewels from India in The
Moonstone, The Sign of Four and Stevenson’s “The Rajah’s Diamond” conveys the
notion that the far-off events in the colony do have a bearing on presumably innocent
subjects at home. The fictional diamonds, like their real-life counterparts,
are inevitably bound up with important events in the colonisation of India. The
traditional function of diamonds as mnemonic trophies now transports threat and
trauma instead of images of a glorious victory. The long-lasting influence of the
Mutiny on the perception of India is evident in the persistence of its depiction
from The Moonstone to The Sign of Four. The Mutiny thus already introduces crime
as lying at the root of the plots.
In their attitudes towards colonial products, the texts also address the change
of the image of the colony from being a site of heroic and financially rewarding
adventures to a more troubled view of the ‘treasure trove’ as the origin of crimes
and curses. The extraction of wealth, which was formerly framed only as adventure,
is now a crime. The image of India as criminal is supplemented by the idea
that it also converts Englishmen to criminals and exports crime. Threatening natives
and drugs appear accompany the diamonds. The prominence of drugs in The
Moonstone and The Sign of Four is complemented by metaphorically imbuing the
diamonds with a contagious disease. Like the diamonds, opium is acolonial product
which still retains its Oriental character. It likewise shares the Orientalisation
of the commodity.
Apart from the realms of history and romance, diamonds unite the disparate
spaces of the domestic and the colonial. They are a stock metaphor in the Victorian
praise of the dutiful “Angel in the House”. Coventry Patmore,deliberately
chooses the Koh-i-Noor, the figuration of India, to describe Honoria. Accordingly,
in the texts the woman and the diamond are linked, but the material Indian
diamond and the metaphor of domestic bliss are mutually exclusive. Only when
the treasures disappear from England can the male protagonist be rewarded with
marriage. The prerequisite to reinstall domesticity is the destruction of the diamonds
and their history as loot. This however, is only partly successful as the
Rajah’s Diamond and the Great Mogul lie irrecoverably at the bottom of rivers
where their uncanny presence continues. The Moonstone, too, ends on a similar
note, promising more adventures in the future. In these endings, the diamonds
have again evaded control and exhibit the same resistance to appropriation.